Dave

I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.

Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It’s dull and predicable, but really, really solid.

Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I’d tried in about 20 years that I didn’t mess up in a week or so.

Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)

For some reason, Mint doesn’t provide access to the power profiles out of the box… no idea why. I just install a Cinnamon applet called “Power Profiles” and it gives me the same systray switcher as Fedora.

Fresh install of Mint was giving me about 2 hours battery life. By switching to Power Saver profile, I can get up to about 6-8 hours. I mostly only need to go to Balanced or Performance when gaming.

I’m starting to think that we need to see AI research in the same way we see biological weapon research - a visit from a SEAL team or a cruise missile for any identified laboratory. Smash the disks, burn all the print outs!

Okay, this is hyperbolic and unrealistic, but I agree with this lion-maned YouTuber - we are really not ready.

AI as a tech is game changing, but it practically demands at least UBI (and probably some form of socialism) as a prerequisite. We, meanwhile, are still electing conservative governments! The same arseholes that will label the legions of unemployed artists, actors, musicians, coders, admin assistants etc etc as lazy and cut their benefits.

Does anyone truly believe that a tech that can replace half of human jobs is going to create happy outcomes in today’s society? Or will it just make tech-bros and scammers richer, and virtually everyone else poorer?

Working from home has its pros and cons. Fortunately, in my experience, the pros are all mine and the cons are all someone else’s. That kind of colours my judgement.

Clowns who think like this need to fuck all the way off… and, honestly, it’s up to older folk like me to make that clear. Younger folks are going to be fooled or scared into thinking like this and be unable or unwilling to speak up. We who have less pressing concerns need to have their backs.

That and the woke mind virus.

Why did its valuation tank after Elon Musk took over and started enacting his policies? Perhaps we’ll never know…

Yep. Even when clicking the single checkbox captchas, I try really hard to click it “just like a human would”. Which is weird, because I am a human. I think.

I had a similar need, and it prevented me from moving to FireFox for a long while. Luckily, I did manage to get fx_cast to work, and it’s been flawless ever since. In fact, I’d say it work more reliably than Chrome’s casting!

Pretty good. It’s my default morning scroll, at least.

I’ve got a lot more comfortable with it since using Alexandrite on desktop and Sync on mobile.

The only thing really missing at the moment is content. It tends to be good for the high profile stuff, but a bit lacking for the niche stuff. I still sneak back to the other place on occasion to catch up on smaller communities… hopefully that will come with time.

Great stuff! I’ve been using Alexandrite for the last few weeks and it’s become my default UI. I love that you can pin the navigation bar open and favourite communities (click on the icon to star it).

You know, I’ve been using Mastodon for 10 months and I’d never noticed the Explore link! My interface even has the fresh, dismissable help text at the top of that column! :D

Yeah, me too. From a consumer perspective, music streaming (not just Spotify) has managed to remain a worthwhile offering, the kind we all said we’d be happy to pay for if it just existed back in the piracy age…

Contrast with video streaming, where you now need to have five different subscriptions just to have a hope of watching half the things you want, where the content changes all the time and geo-limitations abound.

Take my extra quid, Spotify!

I mean, it’s worth a try… what else could have possibly caused such a steep downturn in Twitter’s fortunes since Musk took over and started enacting his policies?

There’s a sweet spot, right? Popular enough to be viable; not so popular that the quality decreases.

It’s probably improved a lot since the early days. I remember it being significantly worse than the Google Music it was replacing.

They actually did a trial of such a sub in various Scandinavian countries, cost about five quid a month or so, which is entirely reasonable. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.

That’s cool. I’m not saying they should only offer it without YT music, just that they should offer an alternative way of supporting YouTubers without buying a service you don’t need.

I really wish they’d drop the YouTube Music aspect of this and just do an ad-free YouTube sub. Happy to pay content creators for their work; less happy to give Google money for a music platform after what they did to Google Music.